Danielle Crittenden’s daughter Miranda died suddenly at the age of 32.Supplied
Danielle Crittenden is the author of Dispatches From Grief: A Mother’s Journey Through the Unthinkable.
If you suffer a tragedy, there will be no shortage of people offering hope. “You’ll get through this.” “It’s hard now but it will get better.” “You’re strong – and one day you’ll realize this will make you stronger.”
It’s a kind impulse. It’s a generous impulse. But it’s also the most unwelcome impulse.
Two years ago I suddenly lost my eldest daughter, Miranda. She was 32. The cause was complications from a brain tumour she’d had removed five years earlier, along with the pituitary gland it had destroyed. Her doctors had assured Miranda and us that she would live a full, healthy life. That didn’t happen. One February morning, the call came. Miranda was gone, and so was my life as I knew it.
For months I could hardly pick myself up from the floor. I was grateful to the friends who rallied around me and my devastated family. Without their love and care, I don’t know how we would have managed to re-enter the world.
Dispatches from Grief documents the ‘omnipresent’ trauma of tragic loss
But when I went to seek help from the literature on grief, I was confronted again and again by the promise that my grief would follow tidy “stages” on a path to healing. The most famous proponent of this idea is, of course, the Swiss psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross. In her seminal bestseller, On Grief and Grieving: Finding the Meaning of Grief Through the Five Stages of Loss, she neatly mapped out the journey ahead: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and finally, acceptance.
My immediate reaction was: Is this a joke?
Hey, I get that you’re upset right now. Sure your heart was blown up and your guts are splattered everywhere. Maybe you’re thinking that you’d rather be dead than live another moment without your child. I know, I know, the pain is physically excruciating. No, there’s nothing you can take to make it stop. But if you just trust in the five stages, you’ll get through this and your life will be normal again.
Here’s my reply to that:
Denial: I saw my daughter’s lifeless body. I shovelled dirt on her grave. I get it. She’s dead.
Anger: At who? The doctors who failed to recognize Miranda’s hormone levels were dangerously low? Fate itself, for bringing this calamity upon her and us? But what good would that do? Shouting at the sky won’t bring Miranda back.
Bargaining: Again, with who? God, if I promise to be a better person can you please reverse this obvious mistake?
Depression: Duh.
Acceptance? Never. Resignation, maybe.
My son said, “Yeah there are stages. But no one tells you they can happen all at once.”
Social media’s grief accounts found me fast. They were no better. Reels of babbling brooks, beaches at sunset, drifting clouds. A frequently meme’d passage attributed to the 13th-century poet Rumi: Sorrow prepares you for joy. It violently sweeps everything out of your house, so that new joy can find space to enter. It shakes the yellow leaves from the bough of your heart, so that fresh, green leaves can grow in their place. It pulls up the rotten roots, so that new roots hidden beneath have room to grow. Whatever sorrow shakes from your heart, far better things will take their place.
The author with her daughter.Supplied
This sentiment astonished me most, not least because it is so pervasive. Happiness gurus abound in American culture. To them, the worst thing that can happen to someone is an opportunity for personal growth and even a path to a fuller, more joyful life.
Arthur C. Brooks, one of the nation’s most prominent happiness gurus, has a signature mantra: “Never waste your suffering.”
“We’ve all faced heartbreak, failure, and loss,” Mr. Brooks writes. “But what if those moments weren’t just obstacles? I ask my students to keep a failure and disappointment list. Every time something painful happens, they write it down, leave space, and come back later to reflect: ‘What did I learn?’
‘What unexpected good came from this?’”
“Over time,” Mr. Brooks continues, “you start to see a pattern: growth, meaning, and even joy hiding behind the hard stuff. Pain is real. But so is the transformation that follows.”
I don’t dispute that we can learn from past experience, just as I don’t dispute that hardship can lead to ambition and success. But much of Mr. Brooks’ teachings are dressed-up ways of stating the obvious. On a recent podcast, he acknowledged that losing a child presents its own challenge to recovering happiness. He urged grieving parents to seek comfort with other grieving parents (Noted, thanks!).
The trouble with these happiness-splainers is that few, if any, have suffered real catastrophe. Mr. Brooks himself acknowledges: “By every measure, I have lived a charmed life – overflowing with love, faith, and the kind of professional success that brings with it intellectually stimulating work. Yet, like some ungrateful wretch, I barely paused to enjoy it. I was a professional complainer, the sort of person who would unironically grouse that ‘the service in first class on United has really gone to hell.’”
Each loved one I’ve lost taught me something about how to live
Mr. Brooks is only one voice among many urging victims of tragedy to embrace it. When JoAnn Bacon’s child, first-grader Charlotte, was shot dead in the Sandy Hook massacre of 2012, the national media besieged her family. Amid the inevitable calls for gun control, Ms. Bacon felt pressured to find a “gift” or purpose in her daughter’s murder.
In an open letter after the tragedy, she wrote:
“What I want to know is how anyone can think that I will ever be okay with my daughter’s murder? I am outraged, and want to scream, ‘Why are you not outraged?’ And as for blessings, you don’t want to travel down that road with me. You can count your blessings, but I don’t feel very blessed at the moment.
“You also don’t want to remind me that great things come from great tragedy. I do not want to hear how my daughter’s death taught you something profound or compelled you to do something. My daughter was not placed on this earth to die and give new perspective. Charlotte was here because she was wanted, was loved, and had something to offer this world while she was living. Everything else feels like an appeasement, and it hurts.
“What non-grievers like is to find inspiration, the silver lining, and the triumphant end. I despise being told that I am an inspiration. It truly makes me uncomfortable.... I am a grieving mother.”
I am a grieving mother.
Like JoAnn Bacon, I didn’t ask for this unreturnable, so‑called gift. If you’re telling me I’m more sensitive to human suffering than I was before, true. If you want me to understand that I’ve joined the centuries‑long chain gang of human misery, yes. But let’s not dress it up as enlightenment. Miranda’s death is not my spiritual gain. I was happier with my child than without her. Nothing better will grow in her place. My “truth” is that my daughter is dead.
Miranda as a child.Supplied
The “gifts” I do have arise from Miranda’s memory. When someone you loved dies, I find you try to absorb their best qualities – and not even consciously. Miranda had an antenna for other people’s pain and struggles. As a friend wrote to me shortly after her death: “Miranda had an ability to see through to the soul; a tattooed facade didn’t cloud her perception, nor was she encumbered by generational or societal convention. Miranda may have judged people for being boring, but never for being human.”
In embracing Miranda’s spirit, I’ve developed a second sight for the suffering around me. I ask strangers sincerely how they are doing. I’m much more patient. I listen to people’s stories. So often, they are about their own losses.
A compatriot from the Land of Grief, a new arrival, a mother who’d lost her 32‑year‑old son to cancer, told me about the gift she’d found in his memory. “I have to remember that Sean’s life was a gift,” she said through tears. “And also that my life is a gift.” I sat with this for a moment. A different angle from the happiness hucksters who insist grief itself is the gift. She continued: “It would be a disservice to Sean, and to myself, if I were to squander that gift. I can keep his memory alive by doing things he would do and talking about him. But I also have to appreciate my own gift of life and make use of it. It really is a gift to exist.”
Her words gave me a different way to think about life-after-grief. “Miranda wouldn’t want you miserable” is not enough. Trying to honour her memory is not enough. I need to embrace my own gift of life to move forward. To live not just for others but for myself. Perhaps this is what “getting through” grief actually means. Not returning to who you were. That person is gone. But learning how to live again, and why.
I keep a black‑and‑white photo on my dressing table of Miranda at 16 in Paris. She was laughing as hard as she could. Her head tilted back, mouth perfectly round. Pure, heedless joy. The‑whole‑world‑is‑before‑me joy. It wrenches my heart every time I look at it. But it’s also a reminder from Miranda herself: Keep seeking joy.